Program Equivalence

Summary

Program equivalence is arguably one of the most interesting and at the same time important problems in formal verification. It has attracted the interest of several communities, ranging from the field of denotational semantics and the problem of Full Abstraction, to software verification and Regression Testing. The aim of this meeting was to bring together the different approaches and techniques of the current state of the art and to facilitate the cross-pollination of research between these areas.

This interdisciplinary community met once before in the workshop on program equivalence in London (April 2016). There was a general agreement among the participants that a research community around this topic should be established in the form of a workshop and eventually a conference, and that the interest in this topic continuously grows around the world, including a growing interest in the industry. Furthermore, currently there is little overlap in the conferences that some of the key players attend, to the point that many participants were little aware of other participants' work.

We were happy to witness that indeed participants learned greatly from this week, collaborations were established, and cross fertilization between the communities occurred. We hope to meet again in Dagstuhl in the future!